Happy holidays

Today is Patriots Day here in Massachusetts. The Red Sox play at 11, which gets the game out just in time for folks to see the Boston Marathon runners come by Kenmore Square. That's always cool, and I enjoyed it in my Boston resident days.

This morning I'm at the office, but probably not for more than a few hours. The temperature is climbing fast, and is expected to hit the high 80s - since the building A/C isn't fully firing yet it's going to be a sweatbox soon. It's pretty deserted here today, anyways. I'm just doing some prepwork for the upcoming class. Fortunately, I packed shorts in my briefcase this morning "just in case", and I think I'll change into them soon.

Jane is watching Harry and Isabel this morning while their mom goes to an appointment. She and David went over to their house for it, since there's a backyard to play in there and we don't really have one. We don't have much to do today - when I leave here, I'll probably head over to join them.

In other news, Apple revamped their entire portable line today as expected. PowerBooks now top out at 1.5 GHz, and iBooks now top out at 1.2 GHz. With that, all Apple systems are finally over the 1 GHz mark. If I needed a PowerBook, now would be the time to get one. Expect iMac updates soon - Apple likes the iMac to be a little faster than the eMac, and now that the PowerBook is updated there's no reason to hold back the iMac speed anymore. Given apparent IBM constraints delivering the 90nm G5 chips, I don't expect a G5 iMac or PowerBook until fall. Any faster chips they get will go to Xserve backorders for now and then into the promised PowerMac refresh - when Jobs announced the G5 last year he vowed 3 GHz by this summer.

This means that the G4 will be around awhile longer, and so the current line (except for the iMac) will probably remain stable for some time. If I had to bet on it, I'd say the iMac update will be in the next week or two, but I very well could be wrong. When it comes, expect a switch from the GeForce 5200MX video processor to a Radeon 9100 or thereabouts, and the processor speed to hit either 1.42 GHz or an even 1.5 GHz.